I miss old APA.... For me the way I originally joined was a hit on Google. APA was like the second option when I googled TTC after miscarriage. It brought up the TTC thread and the first link was to Jenna when she did the OV watch. Her thread was literally called "diary of an OVwatch user" I remember so clearly because APA and the support I received on the site meant so much to me for so so so many years. I mean I joined in '08!!!

since there is lack of people on the site in general, i would see about boosting the site itself, drop the "pregnancy" (which makes non pregnant mommas feel odd about using the site) call it "american momma association forums" or something. find a way to get an add in the baby stuff and in the ob and pediatric offices around the country, use facebook to draw people to the site as being anonymous parenting help and don't connect any facebook accounts to the site.once people start using the site then moderater started hot topics to keep people comming back and incentives for them to get friends to join too should help with keeping people on here. use all forms of social media to get the name out there and keep it heavily monitered to keep trolls from being a problem (as well as advertisments in posts) (ads and trolls along with rude and mean replies are the main problems i see on another parenting site i frequent. they have an average 10 new posts a day with 3-20 replies per post depending on topic)

we need to contact all the mommas we lost to facebook groups to come back, they need a personal invitation to return to help rebuild the community. every time i see a momma i know post a parenting question on fb i respond with an invitation to the other mothering advice site and used to do one for here too here but stopped inviting to here because there is not enough people left.

you were a mod before the sites switched, how many of the old site mods are left? and how does one become a mod?

do the higher ups not care that the site has died? do they know there is only one mod left that checks in on the posts? i am curious as to their view of whats going on and if they are working on a revival plan or if they are just letting it die out

I'm not sure what the site owners are thinking. I do know that this format was chosen for its mobile friendliness. You can look at it in a similar way as the old site by choosing categories from the drop down menu (three lines in the upper right by your profile picture).

i have been on mammapedia.they are a bit rude. and there are trolls and spam but they clear it out quick enough. but theres traffic. several new questions daily, several answers to your questions. the set up of the site is not ideal but it works

We are sorry to hear that some of you do not like the new forum software. We looked at many solutions and where mobile usage was headed - and this platform was one of the best on the market. It's open source with very little fixed cost and has a strong community, which is obviously very attractive to a small non-profit like APA.

We did seriously consider patching together the old forum software (as best we could) just for the convenience of the community, but it kept getting attacked and spammed so heavily it was a great burden of technical debt to upkeep / maintain.

With all of that said, we want to thank all of you who have contributed so much to the APA forums. Your positive attitudes, care and passion for keeping the forums a pleasant online destination for the community is appreciated. We believe that is precisely what makes this community different from the others.

If you are reading this thread, we have a few questions:

Do you use the forums more on your desktop or mobile phone / device?

What is your biggest complaint about the way the current forum works?

What would you like to see APA do to improve engagement here in the forums?

Our goal is to collect feedback, improve your experience and hopefully rejuvenate the forums in the process. Any tactics or strategies you have to help us stimulate / accelerate this effort is welcomed.

Thank you again for all your contributions, we sincerely appreciate your help.

i use a desktop.after getting ajusted to the new site it works just fine. i prefer it to a few other sites i am onthere are few people on the site. there is no traffic. i often find that i am the first to respond to new users, and then days later someone else will chime in. if there were more people to answer questions and get people to come to the site and stay to use it for advice and fun then it could be built back up to what it used to be.

i frequent another site and the average number of answers on day 1 is 9. 9 answers in a day. here you get maybe 2 answers in a week. no one returns to the site to ask another question because so few answered the first time. the other site has an average of 12 new questions daily. be it serious parenting questions or just for fun ones, theres always new questions to be answered there.

i don't know about the others but i try to check on daily to answer the questions of the newbies that come for answers. so i see that nothing new happens for weeks at a time. and as a member and nothing more theres nothing i can do about it so i hope that something can be done to revive the site. i found so much help here when i was pregnant for the first time, i found even more help as i raised that baby and had a second then the site died and i had to turn to a forum of often rude mommas for advice. so i miss the site and the mommas that made it

I'm mobile on my kindle usually and as a moderator I significantly prefer this site to the old one.

I'm not on any other forums except one for knitting.

I use Facebook for most of my online interactions. The APA Facebook page is doing well but I'm not sure that they'd want to invite a whole bunch of new people into it.

I'm not sure how we had so many great ladies on the old site and they are really what made it so great. The forum change just seemed to come when a lot of that crew was done with TTC and early childhood. They then didn't want the hassle of learning the new forum when they were debating even staying.

So, I have no clue on how to attract additional people to the forum right now. Even the regular "Am I Pregnant" questions have really dropped off.

I don't know, maybe it's only me but, I see a lot of posts that are from last year. I go to replay and it's like whoa that's old, nevermind! Is there anyway to hide all the old stuff and keep only new posts? Whomever needs can search for older posts?

i had hoped that since admin responded in this thread that things would pick up or change, but if anything its worse. i feel bad for the newly pregnant mommas out there that could of used this site as a resource like we were able to. i got so many helpful answers on here. and everyone was usually nice too, my other momma site can be supre rude and unhelpful

It really is a shame. This was a nice community, lots of encouragement and advice.

To address this post though - I use both desktop and mobile. I personally don't see - or recall - a difference from the other version. Just remember when the switch happened there were a lot of login issues and I feel like thats what made people leave, I almost didnt want to keep trying.

As far as other forums, the only other one I participate in is a FB group called Mommy Tips 101. I really like it, lots of activity, questions and advice, even some games, announcements or shared articles that might interest other moms and most are really nice and don't bash on each other (you have some opinionated/passionate mamas though). There are people from all over the country but I find that FL has a lot of members.

We are currently working on new content for the site as well as a blog focused on the fun/entertaining parts of pregnancy. As you all know, are a nonprofit and work really hard to find the funds to invest into these types of things like new content and engagement.

This year we have achieved great things, relaunched the site, launched a provider app and launched The Family Funder. The forums were grown organically by word of mouth and engagement done by you Ladies, thank you! We notice that once mom's have their LOs they move on until they get pregnant again.

I am personally hoping that you could entertain/understand that, it is you all that make the forums great not us. We created it for you guys to encourage each other and send friends to when they are pregnant or trying to get pregnant and need support.

We wish to thank you all for being the Rock of our forums and hope that a collective of efforts with new content and you guys making a place women want to be a part of, is what it takes to bloom this forum